The Fugitive Gesture

Rooted in a shared commitment to feminist, queer and anti-caste politics, the project explores how Bharatanatyam has been shaped by deep brahminical and colonial fractures to the art form’s lineage. Once associated with the agential labour of marginalised communities, Bharatanatyam was later institutionalised in ways that policed and erased eros, reshaping the dancing body to fit caste-bound and colonial moral frameworks. 

Presented as a performance lecture, The Fugitive Gesture is a work in progress. Drawing on gesture, language and structured improvisation, the work asks how we might repair the lost pleasures of the dancing female body — not by seeking restoration, but by embracing gesture as fugitive, contingent and alive. 

Audiences are invited into this unfolding conversation and creative process, where eros becomes a vital, reparative force within the practice. 

CREATIVE TEAM

Nithya Nagarajan

Danish Sheikh

Artist Bios:

Nithya Nagarajan is an interdisciplinary artist-writer-curator of Tamil ancestry. In 2024, Nithya co-created and co-directed the critically acclaimed dance-theatre work Nakiya: A Dancing Girl at Belvoir St Theatre. Select creative credits include The Jungle and The Sea (Assistant Director – Belvoir St Theatre 2022), Sacred Grooves of Secular Spaces (Director, MPavilion 2020) and Outwitted! (Co-Director, Happenstance 2017).  Currently, Nithya serves as Curator and Artist Development at Parramatta Artist Studios. She was previously co-Artistic Director at Arts House, International Engagement Adviser - Asia at Creative Australia and Manager - Community and Participation at NIDA. She is the co-founder of South Asian artist collective H-ME W-RK.  

Nithya holds an award-winning PhD in Performance Studies and is the co-founder of South Asian artist collective H-ME W-RK. 

Danish Sheikh is a legal scholar and playwright based at La Trobe Law School in Melbourne, where his research and teaching explore how law can be reimagined through storytelling, theatre, and acts of repair. His play Love and Reparation restages the Section 377 litigation in India, blending legal transcripts, personal memory, and poetic invention to tell a story of defiant queer love. Danish’s work has been cited by the Supreme Court of India in its landmark judgment decriminalising homosexuality, and has been recognised with the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia’s Early Career Researcher Prize and Midsumma’s Queer Playwriting Award. 

Cover Image: Teague Leigh, QPAS 2025

The Fugitive Gesture is part of a year-long suite of programs within Utp’s 2025 provocation – who is ready for another world considers this moment of collective grief, models of collective liberation and resistance to settler-colonialism.

PARTNERS AND SUPPORTERS

This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW and the Neilson Foundation.